Resisting Responsibilisation: Student Experiences of a Student Loan Scheme

Abstract

Over the past decade there has been growing media attention to the problems of student loans, rising tuition costs, an escalating student debt crisis and the implications of all this for graduate futures. However, there has been relatively little anthropological literature that deals with this field. This thesis explores the ways students, the student loan scheme and student loan discourse engage in processes of responsibilisation. Drawing on lived experiences of student borrowers and student loan discourse found in White Papers, parliamentary discussions, media representations and task force policy reports this thesis will discuss how neoliberalisation is entrenched within the funding mechanisms of tertiary education. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic construction of social conditions that encourages and necessitates the production of homo economicus, a historically grounded form of person constituted by market forces as a free and autonomous atom of self-interest. Analysis reveals a shift, parallel with the removal of interest from student loans, in the discursive production of students from ‘market-subjects’ to ‘fiscally responsible’ subjects. I argue that there is an overarching reliance on discourses of student responsibilisation within New Zealand’s Student Loan Scheme, whereby the actions of students and the risks they are exposed to are perceived as rational choices rather than inherent outcomes of a privatising funding mechanism. Student loan discourse, by discursively producing students as ‘fiscally responsible’, are making them responsible to state, the taxpayer, the government, the nation and the future generations of students. Through an ethnographic investigation into contemporary student experience, the neglected voices of students problematize the dominance of the ‘fiscally responsible’ student. Using the concept of ‘competing responsibilities’ (Trnka & Trundle 2014), I argue that students are rejecting their representation as fiscally responsible, making space for other forms of responsibility and obligation that conflict with neoliberal modes. Further, students are also negotiating with and unpacking what it means to be responsible; relocating themselves as experts within the field of student loan expenditure.